How can plagiarism affect your education

What was initially probably no more than a one-off, gradually morphs into dishonest behavior, and dishonest behavior results in sloppy research. A persistent myth is that scientific journals remain the guardians of academic knowledge. These journals are essential to academia whose social world classifies researchers into those who are or are not suitable to be hired by an institution, or become directors of laboratories or research centers, for example.

Plagiarism discredits the whole profession, so plagiarism scandals also affect those who are not guilty, encouraging rumors about their integrity. In this way, people who have published a few poorly constructed sentences find themselves suspected of plagiarism. This is even more upsetting for those holding high academic, political or religious positions.

Such rumors may be spread by interests that have nothing to do with academia. However, nobody has the right to be a self-appointed prosecutor rumor over social networks or blogs. Today, social media often acts more quickly than official inquiry boards even when these do try to deal with cases that come up.

Any university that chooses to fight plagiarism must first set up an investigation commission; the investigations will likely be long and costly. Furthermore, when plagiarism is discovered in research laboratories or other university departments, more time must be spent checking that it has not spread throughout the establishment. The ten consequences of plagiarism. Joshua P. Becoming Obi-Wan. Washington View. Maria Ferguson. How have special education students fared during the pandemic? Under The Law.

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Donna Housman. Preparing emotionally competent early educators. Alexander Russo. Stay up to date on the latest news, research and commentary from Kappan. What you can do: Let students know the consequences of plagiarizing.

Students are less likely to plagiarize deliberately if they perceive the cost of getting caught as too high. Make sure to have a clear statement in your syllabus, and let students know that you use Turn-It-In, Google, or some other method of checking their sources. Make it so hard to plagiarize that they might just as well write the paper. Requesting these things does not mean you necessarily have a whole lot more work to do. You can use a peer response exercise or in-class work for quick reviews of many of these items.

If you ask for multiple drafts, only check for a few things on each draft for example, just for main idea and basic structure on the first draft or just for citation format on a second draft. Besides preventing plagiarism, collecting these documents can help you assess student learning and, when necessary, intervene before the bitter end. Make it hard to plagiarize by designing assignments around specific, focused questions or issues.

Avoid general topics like character in Hemingway. There are so many papers on the internet on such topics that the temptation may be too great. What you can do: Help students learn how to pace themselves and organize their work, especially if the task you have given them is complex, and they are novices. This can be done by warning them of common process problems at the start, by assigning intermediate steps, by conducting an ongoing discussion of their process online discussion groups are good for this and do not take class time , and by modeling your process.

Explicitly discuss with students why the assignment is important in the context of the class and of their learning. Tell them what transferable skills and knowledge they will gain from doing this assignment. Finally, as in 10, make the risks and consequences of being caught clear. What you can do: Help students see how they already have expertise in many areas, such as movie reviews, their favorite music, sports, or leisure activity, and equate learning academic jargon with the learning they have already done to master these other topics.

Have students write down their ideas before, during, and after research. The student who has put down their guesses about what they will find and who has written a response immediately after reading a source will be less likely to act as a passive collector of information. Situate research as the attempt to test and refine their hypothesis. Show students examples of student papers with uncited summaries and paraphrases and require them to identify and correct the problem.

When a paper is handed in, give it a quick scan. If the student only cited direct quotes, he or she may be neglecting summaries and paraphrases. What you can do: Teach students to put their source material out of sight when they write their summaries so they are not tempted by the lovely words of the author. Look for papers in which the citations only come at the end of paragraphs. This is often a sign that the student thinks the citation in the last sentence covers all borrowing from the source anywhere in the paragraph.

What you can do: Explicitly discuss with students the goals of their research. Acknowledge up front that citation styles, especially for internet sources, are in flux. Work with other teachers in your school or better yet, your district to develop citation rules that govern all student work, and use those rules consistently from teacher to teacher and subject to subject.

Help students learn how to extrapolate from the examples presented in style manuals to craft citations for unusual sources. Widespread cases of plagiarism like these can make it difficult for universities to rebuild their reputations. While plagiarism most often refers to using someone else's writing without proper acknowledgment, failure to accurately cite sources can also create major problems for credibility and accuracy in research fields. An abundance of plagiarized content in papers can pollute the authenticity of research results, causing bad information to infiltrate published studies and lead to inaccurate conclusions, states Harvard psychology lecturer Dr.

Shelley H. This can seriously damage not only the authors' reputations, but also the direction of different trends of research and entire fields of study. Strong student-instructor relationships are crucial to a positive learning environment, but plagiarism can take an atmosphere of trust and respect and transform it into something cynical and negative.

The discovery of plagiarism in essays can negatively affect an instructor's view of a student and inhibit her enthusiasm for teaching, states the University of Massachusetts at Amherst's Ad Hoc Committee on Student Plagiarism.

Similarly, academic dishonesty can cause bitterness among students. Students who are actually doing the assignments may be negatively affected by a classmate's known plagiarism.